If you are running a *NIX OS as non-root, either due
to lack of access (web hosts, for example) or for security
reasons, this will detail how to install Bugzilla on such
a setup. It is recommended that you read through the
Section 2.1
first to get an idea on the installation steps required.
(These notes will reference to steps in that guide.)

You may have MySQL installed as root. If you're
setting up an account with a web host, a MySQL account
needs to be set up for you. From there, you can create
the bugs account, or use the account given to you.

You may have problems trying to set up
GRANT permissions to the database.
If you're using a web host, chances are that you have a
separate database which is already locked down (or one big
database with limited/no access to the other areas), but you
may want to ask your system administrator what the security
settings are set to, and/or run the GRANT
command for you.

Also, you will probably not be able to change the MySQL
root user password (for obvious reasons), so skip that
step.

You can install MySQL as a not-root, if you really need to.
Build it with PREFIX set to /home/foo/mysql,
or use pre-installed executables, specifying that you want
to put all of the data files in /home/foo/mysql/data.
If there is another MySQL server running on the system that you
do not own, use the -P option to specify a TCP port that is not
in use.

After your mysqld program is built and any .my.cnf file is
in place, you must initialize the databases (ONCE).

bash$mysql_install_db

Then start the daemon with

bash$safe_mysql &

After you start mysqld the first time, you then connect to
it as "root" and GRANT permissions to other
users. (Again, the MySQL root account has nothing to do with
the *NIX root account.)

You will need to start the daemons yourself. You can either
ask your system administrator to add them to system startup files, or
add a crontab entry that runs a script to check on these daemons
and restart them if needed.

Do NOT run daemons or other services on a server without first
consulting your system administrator! Daemons use up system resources
and running one may be in violation of your terms of service for any
machine on which you are a user!

On the extremely rare chance that you don't have Perl on
the machine, you will have to build the sources
yourself. The following commands should get your system
installed with your own personal version of Perl:

Ideally, this also needs to be installed as root and
run under a special web server account. As long as
the web server will allow the running of *.cgi files outside of a
cgi-bin, and a way of denying web access to certain files (such as a
.htaccess file), you should be good in this department.

You can run Apache as a non-root user, but the port will need
to be set to one above 1024. If you type httpd -V,
you will get a list of the variables that your system copy of httpd
uses. One of those, namely HTTPD_ROOT, tells you where that
installation looks for its config information.

From there, you can copy the config files to your own home
directory to start editing. When you edit those and then use the -d
option to override the HTTPD_ROOT compiled into the web server, you
get control of your own customized web server.

You will need to start the daemons yourself. You can either
ask your system administrator to add them to system startup files, or
add a crontab entry that runs a script to check on these daemons
and restart them if needed.

Do NOT run daemons or other services on a server without first
consulting your system administrator! Daemons use up system resources
and running one may be in violation of your terms of service for any
machine on which you are a user!

When you run ./checksetup.pl to create
the localconfig file, it will list the Perl
modules it finds. If one is missing, go back and double-check the
module installation from Section 2.6.4,
then delete the localconfig file and try again.

One option in localconfig you
might have problems with is the web server group. If you can't
successfully browse to the index.cgi (like
a Forbidden error), you may have to relax your permissions,
and blank out the web server group. Of course, this may pose
as a security risk. Having a properly jailed shell and/or
limited access to shell accounts may lessen the security risk,
but use at your own risk.

If you are running on a system that uses suexec (most shared
hosting environments do this), you will need to set the
webservergroup value in localconfig
to match your primary group, rather than the one
the web server runs under. You will need to run the following
shell commands after running ./checksetup.pl,
every time you run it (or modify checksetup.pl
to do them for you via the system() command).